8.11.03

New Age Spiritual Wanna-be Gets World-View Validated By African AlkaloidAt one point, I heard him scream out, "No! No! No!" He saw a possible future for himself if he didn't kick heroin - becoming a dishwasher, sinking into dissolute old age with a bad back and a paunch. He asked what he could do to help save the world. He was told: "Clean up your room!"
—Daniel Pinchbeck/Guardian UK

7.11.03

For myself, I cannot live without my art.But I have never placed it above everything.
If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

6.11.03

Animal Housing Projectile'Thus began the reign of the self-satisfied preppie, which turned out no better than the reign of the self-satisfied hippie. These boys had been presented with a platinum credit line of forgiveness even before their consciences had dropped. And they put it to use.'
—Ray Davis is the Count of Monte Christo with a Tek-9

Q: So many of your poems describe the place that you’re in, but also what you’re feeling about it. How do those poems come about?

A: Robert Louis Stevenson said a writer should always have two little books: one to read and one to write in. I have had a little notebook ever since I was in college. So I take notes. Sometimes, out of them, something comes. I really don’t know how poems happen. I know they begin by hearing something in language.
—
Q: Some of your poems talk about living in the moment, not trying to live so far in the future. We all struggle to do that, don’t we?

A: I think that we have to do it all the time. One of the things about the human mind is the imagination which is the source of everything wonderful and the source of being able to put ourselves into other people’s situations and to recognize that suffering is universal and to recognize that other people’s joys and sorrows are not so very different from our own. But it’s also something that insinuates itself between us and what is immediately around us. Even in moments of great joy and pleasure, we find ourselves thinking about something else or imagining something else. We live with both of these things. I don’t think that you can undo that, but you can become aware that it’s so. That makes that scrim between you and the world around you become a little bit more transparent. So that you can live a little bit more in the present. But I think you have to keep reminding yourself.

5.11.03

Edwina White She has just exhibited “Skin Tight’- a series of portraits of missing persons tattooed on suede and is currently working a series based on a New York Times crossword (July 25, 2003).

She mentors a student whose name roughly translates as Sweet mother of god.

Edwina will exit Brooklyn for a month come late September to exhibit new works at the Magma Clerkenwell Bookstore, London, to catch the last days of the Art of Chess show at Somerset House- and visit a vampire club somewhere in Berlin.

4.11.03

Ω{I don't know what you, personally, see here. Probably most people see a black man and a white woman, both of them sexually charged. I don't know Lilli Christine's bloodlines but it's obvious she had more than northern european ancestry. Howlin Wolf is one of those figures that confound straight people everywhere. He was as much an 'Indian' as he was a black man. People run that 'one-drop' con on themselves and then get upset at anyone who doesn't go along with it, or doesn't fit into the rigid standards of classification it requires. The shorter version is neither of these people are what we're told to see them as. And the animal strength they both radiate is what caught my eye the first go-round. Primate power.}

3.11.03

They forage at night from the bottom of streams and ponds. Platypus automatically close their eyes and ears in water. To locate prey, the platypus use their bill. The platypus bill has hundreds of tiny receptors which respond to touch and tiny electro-currents produced when invertebrates move in water.
PlatypusBiological DiversityEarlham College, Richmond, Indiana

Mediocrity is never passive; it avenges itself for its deprivation....the painter no longer in touch with people who don't look at pictures begins to die as a painter. The actor whose life has moved from the marketplace to the studio acts falsely. The novelist grown remote from people who don't read, becomes untrue to people who do read. The thinker who loses contact with people who don't think at all, no longer thinks justly. As the critic whose only wellspring is the work of other men at last gets to know all there is to know about literature. Except how to enjoy it...
Nelson Algren

the green life of change—
...The present marred with reason gone,
And past and present both as one
#—
the silent and impartial stream of time, where the periodicals of fashion will have done with stilted praise
#—
The gypsy knocks his hands and tucks them up,
And seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow,
#—
The pigs sleep in the sty; the bookman comes—#—

2.11.03

"pro-social" messageThere is another, less-often discussed aspect to the Wiggles' success, and it has something to do with the Blue Wiggle, Anthony Field (once named Australian Bachelor of the Year, and who has kept many mums entertained while their children watched Dorothy the Dinosaur). But Anthony is married now...
—Caroline Overington/Sydney Morning Herald 11.03.03